From Solidarity to Martial Law: The Polish Crisis of 1980–1981

Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments

xvii Editors’ Preface and Acknowledgments This volume pulls together documentation on the Polish crisis of 1980–1981 from a variety of archives in both East and West. The months between August 1980 when the Solidarity trade union was founded and December 1981 when Polish authorities declared martial law and crushed the nationwide opposition movement that had grown up around the union represent a pivotal moment in modern Polish and world history. Of all the populations of the Warsaw Pact member-states, Poles had always posed the greatest potential challenge to communist rule. Riots and unrest in Poznań in 1956, in gdańsk in 1970, and in Radom in 1976 were part of a pattern of public resistance which culminated in the creation of the first independent trade union in the communist camp. The 1980– 1981 period, in turn, prepared the ground for the collapse of the Soviet-dominated system in Poland. The documents in this volume describe the events of that critical period from a variety of national and political perspectives. Transcripts of Soviet and Polish Politburo meetings, that were never intended to be made public, give a detailed picture of the goals, motivations and deliberations of the leaders of these countries at which contemporary Westerners could only guess. Records of Warsaw Pact gatherings, notes of bilateral sessions and reports to the political and military leadership of the communist camp provide additional pieces to the puzzle of what Moscow and its allies had in mind. Orders and plans for martial law highlight the level of preparation and efficiency of the crackdown. The collection includes materials from Solidarity, too. Notes and statements from top-level union meetings reflect the organization’s internal dynamics and the mix of priorities of its diverse membership, while speeches by Pope John Paul II and Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński indicate the attitudes of another powerful political force, the Polish Catholic Church. From the United States’ point of view, a variety of materials are included in the collection. Memoranda to the president, notes of National Security Council and other high-level interagency meetings, CIA alert memoranda, intelligence reports and State Department cables spell out American and allied efforts to predict Warsaw Pact behavior, to find ways to avert a Soviet invasion and finally to exact a cost for the crackdown when it finally came. Of particular note are three once-highly classified messages to the CIA from Col. Ryszard Kukliński, who served on the Polish general Staff and for years (until he fled the country ahead of arrest in November 1981) was one of the United States’ most prized undercover sources inside the Warsaw Pact. The volume thus represents the most varied and detailed compilation of original documentation from virtually every important national archival source on the Solidarity crisis that is available in any language. xviii From Solidarity to Martial Law: The Polish Crisis of 1980–1981 represents the final phase of a multinational project that originated in 1992, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the former communist archives were in an early stage of relative openness. In April of that year, the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute now based at the george Washington University, set about establishing a network of scholars, archivists, and human rights activists in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact with the aim of recovering the history of the communist past, officially repressed for decades, and of examining it from a multiplicity of perspectives. The methodology centered around the study of a series of crises in the region during the Cold War: the 1953 uprisings in East germany, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, the 1980–1981 Solidarity crisis, and the 1989 collapse of communism in the region. The first step was to locate and link together experts in each of these countries , as well as the former Soviet Union, then to initiate—or build upon—archival research activities among all available government and former communist party repositories. The project, known as the Openness in Russia and Eastern Europe Project, was able to ride a wave of extraordinary talent, enthusiasm and resourcefulness generated by the atmosphere of the times and the near universal desire in the region to come to terms with recent mutual experiences. The first organization in the region to join the Openness Project was the Institute of Political Studies (IPS) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, an institute established in part to counteract the party-based academic...